Guest Post: The Search For Peace

Elizabeth Kocan is the Owner/Director of Sunny Skies Yoga, a Virginia Beach based Yoga Studio for children.

I love this picture of my daughter.

She was on her way home from a school fieldtrip, and the bus was full of students (pre-school-kindergarten). You can imagine the boisterous environment on that bus as the kids talked, laughed and played. Another parent noticed Cecilia sitting like this, and quickly snapped a picture of her. This parent was amazed, and she couldn’t wait to tell me what she had witnessed.

Amidst the noise, Cecilia quietly found her lotus pose (padmasana), then her jnana mudra, and closed her eyes. Cecilia sat “perfectly calm and still” for a couple of minutes, then took a deep breath, and opened her eyes.

“The clarity and peacefulness in her eyes was incredible,” the parent told me, “I am so glad that I was there to capture that moment for you.” Needless to say, I was grateful too! I was teaching a yoga class that morning, and was unable to go on the fieldtrip.

As a kids yoga teacher, I am fully aware of the benefits of yoga and meditation for everyone. It is exciting that yoga for children is beginning to be understood as a practice that not only has clear physical benefits, but emotional/mental health benefits as well. Children live in the same fast paced world that we adults do. While they don’t have to worry about things like paying bills quite yet, it seems that childhood is more hectic and less carefree these days.

Kids are busy—between school, sports, activities, friends, daycare, etc—there is very little down time. Just as we encourage adults to take time for themselves, and to understand the value of stillness and reflection—kids need that too. Clearly, most children are not going to sit absolutely still on a meditation cushion for 20 minutes and focus on their breathing.

Encouraging them (not to mention empowering them), however, to learn how their breath works, how it links to their feelings as well as to their physiology, can have an incredible impact. For example, when adults are nervous, stressed, angry or in pain, we tend to breathe faster, shallower, and more erratically. The same thing happens to children. Kids can learn to focus on their breathing and slow it down, which then calms their bodies.

I have seen students of mine close their eyes and take deep breaths (even find this mudra) when they know they need extra patience or focus. One student did this every time she attempted a challenging pose in class. Because her breath slowed down, her approach to the pose changed. Her focus increased, her body relaxed, and she began to experience more and more success. The amazing thing is that this same skill—this inward focus and slowed breathing—will come to her when she has to concentrate at school or when issues arise with her peers.

Even the smallest children remember the peace they experienced and seek out that feeling. Keep in mind this is a practice—the more kids practice the more often this response will tend to occur. Eventually, what they learn will come out organically like it did with Cecilia on the bus. She just did what she needed to do to find her place of inner peace at that moment. This is exactly why I love teaching kids.

We should all feel free to actively search for the peace we want at any time, anywhere, and in imperfect conditions.

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